Author Description

Homestead of Dilution is a collaboration between Italian artist Domenico Mangano (b. 1976) and Dutch architectural historian Marieke van Rooy (b. 1974) while they were attending the art and psychiatry residency at the Altrecht psychiatric institution in Holland in 2015. Focusing on the psychiatric institutions that lately have become subject to gradual dismantling, the duo drew from a 1970s utopian experiment for their project, which brought together healthy and mentally ill people to offset the increasing polarization in society at that time. In their exhibition of video, sculptures, drawings and photographs, they take a wider look into the difference between illness and sickness, normal and healthy, and ask how the concept of dilution could bridge and unify radical forms of otherness through an artistic process. The accompanying publication is an extensive reader on the concept of dilution featuring the duos artworks and installations along with writings by John Foot, Ilaria Gianni, Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, Aaron Schuster, Esther Vossen and Marieke van Rooy.